Vermont museum aims to inspire pride, revenues for tribe

Sunday

Apr 18, 1999 at 12:01 AMJan 11, 2011 at 10:58 AM

Anne Wallace Allen, Associated Press writer

When Fred Wiseman found out what the Mashantucket Pequots spent on their museum, funded by revenues from the successful Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, just for the heck of it he did a little math.

"They spent $91 million on a museum!," Wiseman said last month, still amazed by the sum, as he sat at the new Abenaki Museum in Swanton, Vt.

"$1,800 is what we spent on this museum," he said. "They spent 200,000 times what we did."

The Mashantucket Pequots have a 2,260-acre reservation established by Congress in 1983. The Vermont Abenaki, who are scattered around the state, do not have a reservation.

The Mashantucket Pequots are using casino revenues to preserve the language of Pequot by recording prayers, songs, words and other oral history. The Abenaki hold free language classes once a week.

And the Mashantucket Pequots have federal recognition, which enables them to run the casino; in Vermont, Gov. Howard Dean recently reiterated his opposition to allowing the Abenaki even state recognition.

The quest for official recognition is what led Wiseman to open the museum and cultural center earlier this year. Through that recognition, he said, the Abenaki will be able to gain access to the money they need to pull their community from a tradition of unemployment, low education levels, and poverty.

And they need the recognition for more basic reasons, he said.

"It's very important for native people to feel as though they're recognized by the outside community," Wiseman said. "That's important internally for the community, and I think it's important for our credibility with other native people in the United States."

The Abenaki have been pushing for state and federal recognition for many years. The governor's office argues that the Abenaki claim to recognition is flawed because the Abenaki lost their claim to cohesiveness 200 years ago, and then regrouped recently.

That's a claim Wiseman hopes to counter with the exhibits in the one-room museum. Using his personal funds, he has collected relics and modern versions of things made by the Abenakis in western Vermont.

The museum occupies a room in the modest tribal headquarters. Arranged on shelves are baskets, bowls, corn grinders, arrowheads and other items. Along one wall is a long, distinctive fishing spear with a forked end. His students at Johnson State College made the clothes worn by the mannequins.

Wiseman also has artifacts too valuable to keep in the modest building for now. He handles the items, including a tomahawk from the 1700s and a ceremonial peace pipe, with reverence.

"I have things from every era," he said. "A lot of the original pieces we have are probably about 7,000 years old."

Those are currently stashed in a bank vault, so they're not accessible to the children who visit.

"When we get our $91 million, then we'll have a security system and we'll have them in here," Wiseman said. "I would die if anything happened to these."

The artifacts prove the Abenaki have been around for thousands of years, Wiseman said. They were forced underground because their culture wasn't accepted by the dominant culture.

"Even in the 50s, when I was young, it wasn't good to be Abenaki," he said.

An estimated 1,700 direct descendants of the Abenaki tribe live in Vermont. They don't have one definitive leader or spokesman. Those distinctions are something, says a display at the Swanton museum, that Americans of European descent seem to need.

Instead, the Abenaki exist as a loosely linked set of communities around the state. There's a tribal chief in Swanton, Homer St. Francis. There's Jeff Benay, chosen by the Abenaki as chairman of the Governor's Advisory Commission on Native American Affairs. And there are others who come forward to speak out as issues come up.

Wiseman, 51, is a native of Swanton who became aware of his Abenaki heritage when he was 37. An anthropologist by training, he has taken on the museum and federal recognition as a labor of love.

Wiseman isn't a gambler himself; in fact, he deplores gambling. But he personally supports the idea of the Abenaki having a casino in Swanton.

"Casinos are a good way of making money if you're not interested in the ethical concerns," he said. "Personally, I think gambling is a horrible thing. As a human being, I detest it. As an advocate for an Abenaki renaissance, I think it has advantages."

The greater community has mixed opinions, he said.

"Some do want it, some don't," he said. "If we get recognition, it'll be hashed out."

And he has reasons that go beyond casino revenues for wanting recognition.

"People have become quite disconnected from the old ceremonies, the old religion," he said. "That's what I'd really like to see People being able to incorporate an Abenaki identity freely and proudly into who they are."

Photos by The Associated Press

Top Fred Wiseman, an Abenaki himself, founded the Abenaki Museum as part of an effort to gain official state and federal recognition for the Abenaki as native Americans. Bottom An artist's rendering of life in an early Abenaki village hangs on display at the museum in Swanton, Vt.